Music

Steven Van Zandt, an actor and musician known for his turns on “The Sopranos” and Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is launching a music-themed social-networking site that he said will serve as a hub for insider information and advice directly from bands.

The site, Fuzztopia (currently in beta), is expected to launch in three to six months, Mr. Van Zandt said, and he is looking for funding in the low eight figures to get “from the present tense to the future.”

Mr. Van Zandt played the hyper-coiffed mobster Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos” and is a guitarist for the E Street Band. He and his team at Renegade Nation, the umbrella company for his music production and radio ventures, have sought to put all their business efforts online. He said he created Fuzztopia because he felt that there was no music site where experts and newbies could trade stories.

“It’s going to be like an insiders’ sort of Web site fans are welcome to peek in backstage,” he said. “It will be very revealing about what those musicians are thinking, where they get guitar strings at 2 a.m. in Cleveland, what’s their favorite diner in Oslo.”

Artists will be able to stream and sell their music on profiles and connect with their fans, as they can do on other sites such as MySpace and Last.fm. Fuzztopia will also host information on music classes and offer up tips from teachers, possibly a nod to Mr. Van Zandt’s Rock and Roll Forever Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to curb dropout rates by adding music curriculum to schools. Fuzztopia will be free initially but will eventually move to a subscription-based model, though those details are still in the works, he said.

Mr. Van Zandt, also known as “Little Steven,” has been busy building a career as a DJ and radio host to several Sirius satellite shows, including Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a syndicated weekly show celebrating garage rock. He also owns his own label, Wicked Cool Records, which has signed acts like the Charms, the Chesterfield Kings and the Cocktail Slippers.

He has also been critical of the quality of contemporary music and a rock evangelist of sorts, saying that young musicians need to rehearse more and play live shows, rather than learning an instrument in their bedrooms and putting their music on the Internet two weeks later.

“The truth of the matter is that greatness takes time,” Mr. Van Zandt said. “We have to learn to take that time again. Why not give the craft the credit it deserves and see how you can develop your potential, and be a little less promiscuous with your talent and actually spend a minute and learn something? Let’s learn how to write songs again!”

But Fuzztopia won’t be a promotional tool for his interests, he said. “We see the future as more of a cooperation than a competition,” he said. “We already have that philosophy with the radio show. Garage plays everybody; we don’t just play our own records. That’s our position in life, to support the music community, you know? That’s what the rock and roll world is all about.”

LONDON — The Beatles are back, sounding better than ever, and Britain is embracing them one more time.

It’s not exactly 1964 — no fainting teens or visible signs of feverish Beatlemania — but the long-awaited release of the remastered Beatles CDs and the Rock Band video game has again brought the Fab Four to the top of the British charts.

Or, as John Lennon liked to say, “to the toppermost of the poppermost.”

It was B-Day in much of the world Wednesday as the new versions of the old classics finally became available in Britain, the United States and elsewhere and many fans celebrated by flocking to Abbey Road, the studio where the Beatles recorded many of their hits.

Uma Nolan, an Irish nurse visiting London, came to the landmark recording studio to be photographed at the pedestrian crossing near the building made famous on the “Abbey Road” album cover. She plans to buy the entire set of 17 remastered CDs — even though she already has all the songs in collection.

“I will absolutely go out and buy them,” she said. “I’m a huge Beatles fan and have every single LP in original first edition copies. They were the first real pop group. The entire generation was waiting for that to happen. They sent worldwide pop culture off into orbit.”

Nolan, 50, said remastering the Beatles albums will introduce their masterworks to a new generation.

“It brings them up do date and modernizes their music,” she said. “You’re enhancing what was really to begin with, so that can’t be a bad thing.”

High prices are apparently no deterrent — online retailer Amazon.co.uk reported Wednesday that pre-orders for the Beatles box set, priced at 170 pounds ($280), put the Fab Four on top in terms of CD sales.

The robust sales are expected to add to the already considerable wealth of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the “thank my lucky stars” drummer who joined the band just before it had its first hit, as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of the late John Lennon and George Harrison. Court records publicized last year put McCartney’s net worth at about $800 million.

The critically praised Rock Band video game also is expected to sell well, even though McCartney told the New Musical Express magazine in a rare interview that he hasn’t road-tested the offering because he’s not much of a videogamer.

He said he was aware some purists would be offended by the licensed use of the Beatles music in a video game but felt it offered the long-defunct band a chance to reach a new, younger audience four decades after it split.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that it will introduce the Beatles music to people who might never have heard it because they game all the time, they don’t listen to the radio, and they haven’t got much of a record collection,” said McCartney.

The New Musical Express, which targets younger music fans, is using the releases as a chance for a major critical review of the band with the goal of getting a new generation to listen to the Beatles with fresh ears, said reviews editor Hamish MacBain.

“If we can get a bunch of 14-year-olds in 2009 to really hear them, that’s a very good thing,” he said, admitting that it takes “a certain kind of nerd” to appreciate the sonic changes offered by the remastered editions.

MacBain said many fans will shy away from spending 170 pounds for a complete new collection of songs they already have, but said the Beatles have more devoted fans than any other musicians.

“It takes a certain class of fan to replace things time and time again,” he said. “But the Beatles have a lot more of these kind of fans than any other band in the world. And having heard all the remasters, I can say that if you do have 170 pounds in your pocket there are worse ways to spend it. It made me appreciate the band more.”

Not everyone agrees. Rory Mulcahy, a retiree visiting Abbey Road, said he was not convinced he needed remastered CDs.

“I appreciate the songs and I love the Beatles, but I’m happy enough with the CD collection I’ve got,” he said. “I think there is a bit of moneymaking in there.”

The Beatles aren’t the only golden oldies making a nostalgic return to the charts. A collection of Dame Vera Lynn’s greatest hits from World War II has risen near the top of the UK album charts, challenging the top spot held by the much more contemporary Arctic Monkeys.

“It occurs to me that when she was in her heyday during the war she meant much the same as the Beatles did in their day,” said author and historian Jan Morris.

Associated Press Writer Karolina Tagaris in London contributed to this report

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Les Paul, whose innovations with the electric guitar and studio technology made him one of the most important figures in recorded music, has died, according to a statement from his publicists. Paul was 94.

Paul died in White Plains, New York, from complications of severe pneumonia, according to the statement.

Paul was a guitar and electronics mastermind whose creations — such as multitrack recording, tape delay and the solid-body guitar that bears his name, the Gibson Les Paul — helped give rise to modern popular music, including rock ‘n’ roll. No slouch on the guitar himself, he continued playing at clubs into his 90s despite being hampered by arthritis.

“If you only have two fingers , you have to think, how will you play that chord?” he told CNN.com in a 2002 phone interview. “So you think of how to replace that chord with several notes, and it gives the illusion of sounding like a chord.”

“The world has lost a truly innovative and exceptional human being today. I cannot imagine life without Les Paul,” said Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar. “He would walk into a room and put a smile on anyone’s face. His musical charm was extraordinary and his techniques unmatched anywhere in the world.”

Lester William Polfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on June 9, 1915. Even as a child he showed an aptitude for tinkering, taking apart electric appliances to see what made them tick.

“I had to build it, make it and perfect it,” Paul said in 2002. He was nicknamed the “Wizard of Waukesha.”

In the 1930s and ’40s, he played with the bandleader Fred Waring and several big band singers, including Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and the Andrews Sisters, as well as with his own Les Paul Trio. In the early 1950s, he had a handful of huge hits with his then-wife, Mary Ford, such as “How High the Moon” and “Vaya Con Dios.”

His guitar style, heavily influenced by jazzman Django Reinhardt, featured lightning-quick runs and double-time rhythms. In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.

Paul also credited Crosby for teaching him about timing, phrasing and preparation.

Crosby “didn’t say it, he did it — one time only. Unless he blew the lyrics, he did one take.”

Paul never stopped tinkering with electronics, and after Crosby gave him an early audiotape recorder, Paul went to work changing it. It eventually led to multitrack recording; on Paul and Ford’s hits, he plays many of the guitar parts, and Ford harmonizes with herself. Multitrack recording is now the industry standard.

But Paul likely will be best remembered for the Gibson Les Paul, a variation on the solid-body guitar he built in the early 1940s — “The Log” — and offered to the guitar company.

“For 10 years, I was a laugh,” he told CNN in an interview. “ kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.”

Gibson, spurred by rival Fender, finally took Paul up on his offer and introduced the model in 1952. It has since become the go-to guitar for such performers as Jimmy Page.

Paul is enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, the Inventors Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is survived by three sons, a daughter, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Until recently he had a standing gig at New York’s Iridium Jazz Club, where he would play with a who’s-who of famed musicians.

He admired the places guitarists and engineers took his inventions, but he said there was nothing to replace good, old-fashioned elbow grease and soul.

“I learned a long time ago that one note can go a long way if it’s the right one,” he said in 2002, “and it will probably whip the guy with 20 notes.”

Madonna’s concert in Copenhagen on Tuesday finished in tumultuous scenes as Swedish fans tried to return home by train.

A train scheduled to depart from Copenhagen central station at around 1am on Wednesday suffered delays as Swedish fans of the “Material Girl” tried to squeeze into the already packed train carriages.

“People were vomiting and fights broke out. It was verging on panic,” according to Marie Wernhult for news agency TT from the Danish capital.

“The train has left, 20 minutes late, and still there are hundreds of travellers stuck on the platform. And just as many have probably already given up and taken a taxi to Malmö.”

The Danish rail operator DSB has been criticised for not laying on any extra trains despite massive Swedish interest in the self-styled “Queen of Pop’s” Sticky & Sweet tour.

“No extra trains have been arranged and no extra carriages have been added. The trains go as normal with one four-carriage train every hour. DSB has not taken into consideration that was a concert on,” Marie Wernhult said.

DSB has responded however that they had in fact provided extra carriages on five of their trains on Tuesday evening in response to extra demand due to the concert.

“We used all the capacity we had available. We have to keep the other trains running as well,” Irene Lippold at DSB said.

TT/The Local (news@thelocal.se/08 656 6518)

For the week leading up to the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, VH1 has assembled a valuable series of documentaries that revisit significant people and movements from the 1960s - even if they overstate some of those people’s importance.

The week starts tonight with Andy Warhol, then moves through Timothy Leary, the Black Panthers, Muhammad Ali and Cheech and Chong before getting to Woodstock itself.

Old-timers who were there can expect a lot of flashbacks, and those who weren’t might find it educational, a word not always used in connection with Cheech and Chong.

The strongest parts of this week’s series, collectively called “Lords of the Revolution,” are the Black Panthers and Ali, both of whom struck much of white America as dangerously radical in the ’60s.

Today, ironically, the greater danger with Ali is oversentimentalizing him.

He was always a hustler and promoter in addition to being a remarkable athlete. But he did and said some things in the ’60s that did not advance his personal interests, and today he’s rightly respected for that.

As time passes, his complexity also becomes increasingly apparent - as it has for some years with the Black Panthers.

The government feared the Panthers so much it tried to systematically destroy them - and to some extent, the group welcomed that kind of fearful response as a sign of attention and respect.

But the Panthers weren’t just about getting in white America’s face. Their core program was community empowerment and self-sufficiency, a goal toward which many communities today are still struggling.

The Panthers and Ali nights explore more complex questions, in any case, than the Warhol and Leary programs.

Some of tonight’s speakers declare that Warhol shaped all of modern culture, from movies to television to celebrity.

The people who say it, however, all come from within the Warhol circle. It would sound more compelling if someone outside the circle were connecting those same arguable dots.

Warhol’s Factory did turn out, or at least encourage, a number of creative talents, from designer Betsey Johnson to musician Lou Reed and actress Sally Kirkland.

Footage shot back in the day, and there’s a considerable amount of it, now looks like something that could be shown at a high school reunion while people turn to each other and say, “Man, can you believe how wild and crazy we were in those days?”

The sense of zany fun is dampened somewhat, however, by the number of Warhol people who died young and the microscopically thin line between “fabulously creative” and “deeply troubled.” Too often it’s all just sad.

Tonight’s Warhol show does raise one broader proposition: that popular culture is advanced by a small elite of misunderstood visionaries.

Maybe. Sometimes. Credit VH1 this week for putting it on the table.

BABY boomers won’t let go of the Woodstock Festival. Why should we? It’s one of the few defining events of the late 1960s that had a clear happy ending.

On Aug. 15 to 17, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people, me among them, gathered in a lovely natural amphitheater in Bethel (not Woodstock), N.Y. We listened to some of the best rock musicians of the era, enjoyed other legal and illegal pleasures, endured rain and mud and exhaustion and hunger pangs, felt like a giant communityand dispersed, all without catastrophe.

A year after the riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago, expectations about large gatherings of young people were so low that this was considered a surprise. Although the festival didn’t go exactly as planned, it was, as advertised, three days of peace and music. That made Woodstock an idyll, particularly in retrospect, even though it was declared a state disaster area at the time.

“Not withstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work,” Lou Yank, the chief of police in nearby Monticello, told The New York Times.

Yet for all the benign memories, Woodstock also set in motion other, more crass impulses. While its immediate aftermath was amazement and relief, the festival’s full legacy had as much to do with excess as with idealism. As the decades roll by, the festival seems more than ever like a fluke: a moment of muddy, disheveled, incredulous grace. It was as much an endpoint as a beginning, a holiday of naïveté and dumb luck before the realities of capitalism resumed. Woodstock’s young, left-of-center crowd — nice kids, including students, artists, workers and politicos, as well as full-fledged L.S.D.-popping hippies — was quickly recognized as a potential army of consumers that mainstream merchants would not underestimate again. There was more to sell them than rolling papers and LPs.

With the 40th anniversary of Woodstock looming — so soon? — the commemorative machinery is clanking into place, and the nostalgia is strong. There’s a Woodstock Festival museum now at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts and a recently built concert hall at what was the concert site, Max Yasgur’s farm (though the original Woodstock hillside has been left undeveloped).

A new, much expanded anthology of music recorded at the 1969 festival has been issued: the six-CD “Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur’s Farm” (Rhino). Complete Woodstock performances by Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, Janis Joplin and others have been released by Sony Legacy. Cable and public television channels have their Woodstock specials scheduled, and there’s yet another batch of commemorative books, including “The Road to Woodstock” (Ecco) by the festival’s instigator, Michael Lang, which includes tidbits like how much the bands were paid. “Taking Woodstock,” a comedy directed by Ang Lee, is due for release this month.

A summer package tour, Heroes of Woodstock, features musicians who appeared at Woodstock — including Jefferson Starship (playing Jefferson Airplane songs), Levon Helm from the Band, Tom Constanten from the Grateful Dead, Ten Years After, Canned Heat and Country Joe McDonald. It arrives at Bethel Woods precisely on Aug. 15.

Unlike previous anniversaries in 1994 and 1999, however, there’s no big festival this year bearing the Woodstock name — reflecting, perhaps, the dismal memories of Woodstock ’99 in Rome, N.Y., where a hot, pent-up audience, angry at high vendor prices, set fires and looted and vandalized the site.

While the original Woodstock showed how much discomfort an audience would put up with for the sake of sharing an event — something promoters were happy to learn — Woodstock ’99 breached the limit of fan exploitation.

Yet the original Woodstock still has a rosy glow. It was finite and all smiles — far different from the Vietnam War, the racial tensions and the much-discussed generation gap of the same era. Woodstock became free in both senses of the word: free as in liberated (from drug laws and dress codes) and free as in gratis, not collecting tickets and handing out,as Wavy Gravy said, “breakfast in bed for 400,000.”

A cynic might see the festival as a prime example of how coddled the baby boomers were in an economy of abundance. The Woodstock crowd, which arrived with more drugs than camping supplies, got itself a free concert, and when the people responsible could no longer handle the logistics, the government bailed them out. Some people took it upon themselves to help others; many just freeloaded.

Still, Woodstock gave virtually everyone involved — ticketholders, gate crashers, musicians, doctors, the police — a sense of shared humanity and cooperation. Trying to get through the weekend, people played nice with one another, which was only sensible. Musicians performed for the biggest audience of their lives. Townspeople and the National Guard pitched in to keep people fed and healthy. No one, The New York Times reported, called the cops “pigs.”

One lunatic with a gun could have changed everything. The Altamont Festival, marred all day by violence, took place only four months later. Miraculously, at Woodstock, there was none.

Seemingly within minutes after it ended Woodstock was the stuff of legend: a spirit, a nation, an ideal, amorphous but vivid, with an Oscar-winning documentary film, the 1970 “Woodstock,” to prove it wasn’t all a hallucination. (The film was also an early lesson in how profitable ancillary rights could be; the festival itself lost money, but the film recouped it many times over.)

Sheer size made Woodstock consequential. It was huge. The Beatles had played to 55,000 people at Shea Stadium; the 1965 Newport Folk Festival spread about 71,000 people over four days. Had Woodstock drawn the 100,000 to 150,000 people that its promoters planned for, it would simply have been one in a string of big rock festivals dating back to Monterey Pop in 1967, which had an estimated total of 200,000 people over three days.

After Woodstock gave up on collecting tickets — abandoning flimsy fences and declaring itself a free festival — it grew to what was variously estimated as 300,000 or 400,000 people, more than double the attendance of previous rock festivals. That number would have been considerably higher if traffic problems hadn’t turned some away; many people walked for miles to the site.

When the hippie subculture surfaced en masse at Woodstock, two years after the Summer of Love, it was still largely self-invented and isolated. There were pockets of freaks in cities and handfuls of them in smaller towns, nearly all feeling like outsiders. For many people at the festival, just seeing and joining that gigantic crowd was more of a revelation than anything that happened onstage. It proved that they were not some negligible minority but members of a larger culture — or, to use that sweetly dated term, a counterculture.

At Woodstock hippiedom simultaneously reached its public peak and opened itself to imitation and trivialization — one more glimmer of rebellion to be deflated into a style statement.

For true believers Woodstock was about cooperation and mutual aid, and about making love, not war. (At a time when Vietnam had divided America into hawks and doves, that was a peace dove sitting on the guitar in the festival logo.) But Woodstock was also a whole lot of people getting stoned at a rock concert, which was much easier than working to change the world.

Politicos like Abbie Hoffman, who is widely credited with coining the phrase Woodstock Nation, wanted to claim Woodstock as a symbol of resistance to repression. But Pete Townshend batted Hoffman off the stage with a guitar when Hoffman interrupted the Who’s set to protest the imprisonment, for drug possession, of a fellow activist, John Sinclair.

There was antiwar fervor in some songs, like Richie Havens’s “Handsome Johnny” and McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag.” Joan Baez spoke about her husband, in jail for draft dodging, and sang “We Shall Overcome.” There was also, in much of the music, that particular late-1960s aura of imminent doom or enlightenment, in songs like “Wooden Ships” (performed by both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) and the Who’s “Amazing Journey.” And there was Jimi Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” with its screams of feedback and its divebombing glissandos, brash and dire, angry and insistently American. But Woodstock was no earnest rally; it had love songs, blues and extended guitar jams.

After the buzz wore off, the utopian communal aura of a Woodstock Nation gave way, almost immediately, to the reality of a Woodstock Market: a demographic target group about to have its dreams stripped of radical purpose and turned into commodities. A wider audience realized it was possible to enjoy the music, drugs and fun without the ideological trappings. Soon enough everyone was a quasi-hippie; long hair on men no longer signaled anything about what they stood for. FM radio, which was the pipeline for underground rock, traded quirky, exploratory disc jockeys for consistent formats that advertisers could depend on. Now that it was clear how large an audience was at stake — that it wasn’t just a few freaks — professionals were back in charge.

Woodstock and other late-1960s festivals changed the scale of rock concerts. Bands eagerly moved up to arenas from theaters; a week before Woodstock, for example, two of its acts, the Jefferson Airplane and Joe Cocker, shared a bill at the Fillmore East, which had all of 2,700 seats. Music soon expanded, or bloated, to fill its newfound arenas. The early 1970s were the era of noodling jams and 10-minute drum solos that would have to be torpedoed, a few years later, by punk-rock.

Larger gatherings followed Woodstock. An estimated 600,000 people showed up at both the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 and at the one-day Summer Jam at Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973. But those were merely concerts, not cultural symbols. Appropriately or not, Woodstock is still invoked when describing latter-day festivals, although they are considerably smaller, better organized and more comfortable than Woodstock was. None of them tolerate gate crashers.

Since Woodstock I’ve been to more rock festivals than I can easily remember. Most, sooner or later, involve mud. Some have simply been like extremely long standing-room concerts; some have the comforting familiarity of ritual, like the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (which dates back almost as far as Woodstock; it had its 40th edition this year).

A few, like Coachella and Bonnaroo, run in stretches like a smart disc-jockey set, segueing neatly through various bands. And a handful have felt like generational statements: the first Lollapalooza (in 1991) and Lilith Fair (in 1997) and, surprisingly, Woodstock ’94 (in Saugerties, N.Y.), which juxtaposed performers from the original Woodstock Festival with more contemporary bands, creating what was probably the only mosh pit ever to greet Crosby, Stills and Nash. But all of them have been consumer experiences: a planned entertainment package of scheduled music and convenient vendors.

Woodstock was different. It was, particularly for a sheltered teenager, an adventure: sloppy, chaotic, bewildering, drenched, uncertain, sometimes excruciating, sometimes ecstatic. Although I was drug free, I had the feeling that the crowd was more than just an audience at a show, that something major was at stake, that Woodstock would prove something to the world. What it proved — that for at least one weekend, hippies meant what they said about peace and love — was fleeting and all too innocent; it couldn’t stand up to everyday human nature or to the pragmatic workings of the market. But 40 years later the sensation lingers.

Depeche Mode’s Friday night headlining set at Lollapalooza began with a whimper. First, there was the tiny, steady blip of a pre-recorded drum track. Then came a bed of synthesizers, misty and mysterious. Finally, Dave Gahan’s voice — barely a whisper — floating above. When all of those elements finally cohered, it was pure rapture — a kind of revelation in phases.

In a way, that slow build and long sustain is an apt metaphor for Depeche Mode’s career. A trio of over-styled foppish young men, they were nobody’s top pick for arena giants, let alone a sure bet to be bankable career artists when they started 30-plus years ago. Their quirky techno seemed built for the moment, not for the ages. Even their name means “fast fashion.”

Photos from Lollapalooza ‘09: Depeche Mode, Kings of Leon and More

Funny thing, though: Depeche Mode have not only endured, they’ve prospered, and during their startling and frequently riveting set they proved that often the greatest rewards come from patience and restraint. Their songs remain mysterious and doomy, Andy Fletcher’s black synth lines walking lockstep around Martin Gore’s grizzled, distorted guitar. Live, they feel fantastically ominous: “Hole to Feed” was primal and thumping, its icy electronics contributing to the air of menace. “It’s No Good” was all cold industrial grind, Gore’s weird, robotic guitar lines coaxing the song to an apocalyptic conclusion. As they did in New York last week, they concentrated on slower, deep cuts, which yielded their greatest dividends for longtime followers (some of the more casual fans at Friday’s show were a bit exasperated by this decision).

The key to the group’s sustained potency is Gahan. He was a dynamo Friday night, gliding across the stage, spinning on his heel, hefting the microphone stand above his head and punctuating verses with a triumphant, hollered “Oy!” When his low, haunted croon met Gore’s pained bleat they seemed to form a single voice — a strange disembodied howl rising up from the center of the machine.

Kings of Leon’s songs seem a more traditional fit for the big rooms. Their Friday night set — they played the North end of Grant Park while Depeche played the South — was frequently thrilling, if a shade more conventional. The Kings burned breathlessly through a string of blistering, blues-based rock numbers, all of them sewn up with silvery riffing and centered around Caleb Followill’s gruff holler; the group’s neat trick is the bleeding heart they bury at the center of all that bluster. In a way, their fiery rock is Depeche Mode’s polar opposite. Where that band uses mournful synthesizers to mask sinister intentions, the Kings use a mighty sound as a cover for sensitivity. “The Bucket” found Followill promising “I’ll be the one to show you the way,” while the skyscraping chorus of the triumphant “Use Somebody” masked a plea for companionship.

So perhaps its no surprise that what made the group so charming Friday night was their humility. “We do know exactly what we have here,” Followill acknowledged near the end of their set, “and we know that there are a million other bands that deserve to be here.” The group then launched into “Manhattan,” a moody number from their most recent record. Other Kings songs storm in guns blazing, but this one was underplayed, a few twinkling guitar lines supporting Followill’s howl.

“Who needs avenues, who needs reservoirs,” he sang, “Gonna show this town how to kiss the stars.” If Friday was any indication, he’s got a few hundred thousand people ready to show that town right along with him.

The wife of Monkees vocalist Micky Dolenz was arrested Friday on charges that she defrauded an affordable housing program in New York City.

Authorities in the city’s Department of Investigation said Donna Quinter, 54, illegally received $136,866 in government rental subsidies for an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The subsidies were supposed to go to middle-income families living in the city year-round who were in danger of being forced out by gentrification.

Investigators say Quinter failed to disclose that she was sharing the apartment with a friend who paid rent. The home also wasn’t her only residence. Since marrying Dolenz in 2002, the former flight attendant has lived with her husband in Bell Canyon, California, an exclusive gated community outside Los Angeles.

Quinter surrendered to authorities in New York on Friday morning. She was expected to be arraigned later on larceny charges in a Manhattan court.

Her lawyer, Bridget Rohde, didn’t immediately return a phone message.

New York City has a number of programs designed to allow middle class families to pay reduced rents in homes they have occupied for a long period of time.

Fraud, however, is common. In some cases, people hold on to their apartments even after they have moved out of the city, either using them as vacation homes or secretly renting them out.

The Department of Investigation, a city law enforcement agency that probes fraud and other abuses in government programs and agencies, discovered Quinter’s eligibility problems after it began examining who was getting subsidies in her building in 2008.

“Law abiding New Yorkers struggling to pay their rents and mortgages cannot afford to subsidize cheaters who abuse public housing resources to support privileged lifestyles,” the department’s commissioner, Rose Gill Hearn, said in a written statement.

Dolenz isn’t accused of any wrongdoing.

THE three-day Midland rock festival set up to mark the 40th anniversary of Woodstock was hanging in the balance last night – after yet another band was dropped from the bill because promoters could not afford to pay them.

Folk-rock giants Jethro Tull joined the long list of big-name groups to quit the August 7 to 9 festival due to be staged at the West Midland Showground near Shrewsbury, in Shropshire.

They joined a list including Asia, Blood Sweat & Tears, Carl Palmer Band, Focus, Icon, It’s A Beautiful Day, Jefferson Starship, Kilminster Hodge, Martin Turner’s Wishbone Ash, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steve Howe and Uriah Heap.

Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson told the Sunday Mercury: “The promoters have dumped us. They had been stringing us along with promises for several weeks and then called to say we were no longer required.

“We offered to play for half-price because we didn’t want to let down fans. The promoter agreed but then told us he could not afford to do that either.

“Sadly, and rather angrily, I have to acknowledge his effective cancellation of our appearance at the Memories of Woodstock Festival.

“Most of the headline name acts have cancelled in the last few weeks due to default of contract.

“Clearly, he has attempted to put on this festival without adequate funding and has attempted to make all payments out of advance ticket sales, which is a very naive and highly risky.

“He has already attempted to lay the blame on the bands who had to cancel, including the unpaid headline American artists originally advertised.

“I utterly deplore his tactics in forcing us to accept the cancellation at this late date and short-changing the ticket-buyers.

“We had held on, in good faith, in the trust that he would find the additional funding he maintained was forthcoming.

“To then claim the problems are due to over-charging by bands is strongly resented. The marketing and promotion has been dismal and misleading as to the artists appearing.”

The Memories Of Woodstock show – in a 15,000-capacity marquee – is being organised by former sound engineer Brian Davies, 53, who lives in a Scottish cottage named after Fangorn Forest in JRR Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings.

Last night he admitted that only 1,000 tickets had been sold, and that he had to drop Jethro Tull because their fee was too steep.

“Some of these bands are overpaid,” he said. “There has been a very poor response – only 1,000 people bought tickets across all three days. But the show has to go ahead. I cannot afford to cancel it.”

As the Sunday Mercury went to press, headliners Barclay James Harvest, Melanie and Cream star Jack Bruce’s new band were still due to play, alongside 17 other acts, including hasty additions.

Last week the Sunday Mercury revealed the festival was in trouble after a dispute with management company QEDG, who claimed several of its acts had not had contrcted advance payments.

Since then other music figures including the manager of American giants Blood Sweat & Tears, have claimed promised payments and air fares never materialised.

Woodstock Music & Art Fair

When: August 15 to August 18, 1969

Ticket Price: $18 in advance / $24 at the gate (for all 3 days)

On Friday, August 15, 1969, the historical concert event that was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition” quickly became one of the greatest moments is music history.  The organizers thought they could attract between 50,000 and 100,000 people, which was an ambitious and optimistic estimate at the time.  No one knew that more than 500,000 music lovers would turn Woodstock into a fairyland of sound, peace, love, drugs and human conformity.

However, there were a multitude of problems, which one could understand given the magnitude of the event.   Hunger, bad sanitation, water shortages, inclement weather, traffic jams, first aid issues, bad drugs, why the list seems endless.  However, even with these issues, it was a victory for the youth of America and the music world as well.  There was no racial tension at a time when racial tension was at its peak.  There was little resentment toward your fellow man; it was a place of social harmony and free love.  It was a major coup for the counterculture, despite the obvious problems.

Countless books, documentaries, interviews, news articles have captured all the specifics that occurred on Max Yasgur’s farm.  But more than the aforementioned qualities, errors in judgement and logistical nightmares, it was after all, one of the most successful events in music history.  Let’s explore the time line and some of the little known facts behind this massive musical experience.

The Players:

DAY ONE - August 15, 1969

1. Richie Havens

2. Swami Satchidananda

3. Country Joe McDonald

4. John B. Sebastian

5. Sweetwater

6. Incredible String Band

7. Bert Sommer

8. Tim Hardin

9. Ravi Shankar

10. Melanie

11. Arlo Guthrie

12. Joan Baez

DAY TWO - August 16, 1969

1. Quill

2. Keef Hartley Band

3. Santana

4. Canned Heat

5. Grateful Dead

6. Mountain

7. Creedence Clearwater Revival

8. Sly & The Family Stone

9. Janis Joplin

10. The Who

DAY THREE - August 17, 1969

1. Jefferson Airplane

2. Joe Cocker

3. Country Joe & The Fish

4. Ten Years After

5. The Band

After midnight - Monday Morning) - August 18, 1969

6. Blood Sweat And Tears

7. Johnny Winter

8. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

9. Paul Butterfield Blues Band

10. Sha-Na-Na

11. Jimi Hendrix (Hendrix insisted on being the final performer and was scheduled to perform Sunday at midnight.  He didn’t take the stage until 9 A.M. on Monday morning and played for 2 hours to a dwindling audience)

Musical Acts That Declined Invitations:

The Beatles declined because John Lennon said he couldn’t get them all together at the time.

Led Zeppelin was asked to perform, their manager Peter Grant stating: “We were asked to do Woodstock and Atlantic were very keen, and so was our US promoter, Frank Barsalona. I said no because at Woodstock we’d have just been another band on the bill.”  Instead the group went on with their hugely successful summer tour, playing that weekend south of the festival at the Asbury Park Convention Hall in New Jersey.

Jethro Tull declined to perform. Ian Anderson is reported to have later said he “didn’t want to spend weekend in a field of unwashed hippies.” Another theory proposed that the band felt the event would be “too big a deal” and might kill their career before it started.  Little did they know just how important this could have been for the band.  Ironically, in the film Jethro Tull songs can be heard playing in the background between acts.

Bob Dylan was close, but pulled out when his son became ill.  He also was very turned off by the number of hippies hanging around his house, which was near the originally planned site.

The Byrds were invited, but chose to defer, figuring that the event would not be any different from all the other music festivals that summer.  Additionally, there were monetary concerns and they had trouble earlier that year at a performance at the first Atlanta International Pop Festival, held at the Atlanta International Raceway on July 4 and July 5, 1969, where a melee had broken out.

“We were flying to a gig and Roger came up to us and said that a guy was putting on a festival in upstate New York,” recalled bassist John York.   “But at that point they weren’t paying all of the bands.  He asked us if we wanted to do it and we said, ‘No’.  We had no idea what it was going to be. We were burned out and tired of the festival scene. So all of us said, ‘No, we want a rest’ and missed the best festival of all.”

Tommy James & the Shondells declined the invitation because of being misinformed about the size and scope of the event.

Lead singer Tommy James stated later: “We could have just kicked ourselves. We were in Hawaii, and my secretary called and said, ‘Yeah, listen, there’s this pig farmer in upstate New York that wants you to play in his field.’  That’s how it was put to me.  So we passed, and we realized what we’d missed a couple of days later.”

The Moody Blues were included in the original posters as performers, but backed out after taking a gig in Paris on the same weekend.

The band Mind Garage declined because they thought it wouldn’t be a big deal and had a higher paying gig elsewhere.  Oops.

The Randy California-led band Spirit also declined, they had other shows planned and did not want to back out of their commitments; not knowing how big that Woodstock would ultimately become.

Cancelled appearances:

The Doors were considered, but they canceled at the last minute, most likely due to frontman Jim Morrison’s distaste for performing in large outdoor venues.  However, band member John Densmore did attend.

The Jeff Beck Group was an England rock band formed in London in January 1966 by ex-Yardbiirds guitarist Jeff Beck.  Their innovative approach to heavy-sounding blues was a major influence on popular music during the late 1960s and early 1970s….They were scheduled to perform at Woodstock, but failed to make an appearance because the band broke up the week before.

Iron Butterfly was a psychedelic rock and early heavy metal music band, well known for their 1968 hit “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”  They were enroute, however were stuck at an airport, and their manager demanded helicopters and special arrangements just for them.   At one point, helicopters were the only means of transportation that could get to the location.  They were wired back and told, as impolitely as Western Union would allow, “to get lost,” and they left without playing.

Singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell was scheduled to perform, but her agent recommended that she appear on The Dick Cavett Show.  However, she wrote a song from what she had heard from then-boyfriend, Graham Nash, about the festival appropriately called “Woodstock,” that became a major hit for Matthews Southern Comfort and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  She was also discouraged by the audience response to her performance at the Atlantic City Pop Festival that was held earlier in August prior to Woodstock. The audience was so rude that she was not able to complete her set and she walked off the stage, sobbing.

Canadian band Lighthouse were originally was scheduled to play at Woodstock, but in the end they decided not to, fearing that it would be a bad scene.  Later, several members of the group would say that they regretted the decision.

Musician Ethan Brown was scheduled, but was arrested for LSD possession just three days before the event.

More About Woodstock:

In 2009, complete performances from Woodstock by Santana, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, and Johnny Winter were released separately and were also collected in a box-set entitled “The Woodstock Experience.”

It’s also being reported that Woodstock promoter Michael Lang has had to drop plans for a 40th anniversary concert.  When asked why he abandoned the pursuit for a third anniversary concert celebrating the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Lang simply lamented: “Money. No sponsors.”

However, Lang remains busy with Woodstock-related projects.  On August 8th, he will join Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee and screenwriter/producer James Schamus in Woodstock, New York, for an advance screening of the comedy “Taking Woodstock,” which hits theaters Aug. 28. The film, directed by Lee, with screenplay by Schamus, is based on a book written by Elliot Tiber, who along with his parents ran a motel in Bethel during the Woodstock festival.  Should be interesting…..

In 1997, the site of the concert and 1,400 acres surrounding it was purchased by Alan Gerry for the purpose of creating the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts.  The Center opened on July 1, 2006 with a performance of the New York Philharmonic.  On August 13, 2006, Crosby Stills Nash & Young performed to 16,000 fans at the new Center — 37 years after their historic performance at Woodstock.

The Museum at Bethel Woods opened in June 2008. The Museum contains film and interactive displays, text panels, and artifacts which explore the unique experience of the Woodstock festival, its significance as the culminating event of a decade of radical cultural transformation, and the legacy of the Sixties and Woodstock today.

VH1 on Friday, Aug. 14, will air, “Woodstock: Now & Then,” a documentary directed by Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple.  Original Woodstock promoter Michael Lang is executive producer of the film. The History Channel will show “Woodstock: Now & Then” on Aug. 17.

On August 23, 2009 at Belleayre Mountain, which is just west of Woodstock, Lang will co-present Kidstock, with a “Tribute to Woodstock” by young musicians from Paul Green’s School of Rock, the inspiration for the Jack Black movie.